I used to read The New York Times exclusively on their website, but for some reason I downloaded the app, figuring it would work better on my phone, and then I allowed push notifications, and that’s how I learned on Monday afternoon…
In a major victory for the Trump administration, the Supreme Court on Monday allowed it to fire thousands of Education Department employees, functionally eliminating the agency.
What’s more…
The court’s decision, while technically temporary, lets workers who had been reinstated during the legal battle be fired again.
Well, ain’t that a kick in the head. Imagine that, another “major victory” for the most corrupt administration in my lifetime and probably American history, delivered by a corrupt Supreme Court. This is just exhausting to see, week after week. And here we thought summer would be relaxing. Instead, it’s just hot. And infuriating. A friend shared a witticism going around in his youngest daughter’s crowd: When this is over, woke is coming back to hard there are going to be tribunals for people with outdoor cats.
If it’s ever over, that is.
On that theme, I don’t know how I missed this on Sunday. Headline:
The Canadians Are Furious
Trump accomplished what was once considered impossible: Our northern neighbors have united against us.
In early May, Carney and Trump held a predictably surreal press conference in the Oval Office. Trump began genially, congratulating Carney on his election: “It was probably one of the greatest comebacks in the history of politics, maybe even greater than mine.” But when a reporter asked if he still envisioned Canada as the 51st state, Trump killed the goodwill.
“You know, I’m a real-estate developer at heart,” he said. The president waxed poetic about erasing “that artificially drawn line” on the map between the U.S. and Canada, saying that “when you look at that beautiful formation, when it’s together — I’m a very artistic person — but when I looked at that beauty, I said, ‘That’s the way it was meant to be.’” Carney interjected coolly, “Well, if I may, as you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale. We’re sitting in one right now.”
Isn’t that wonderful? The Trump administration is six months old. Or maybe we should think of it as 25 percent down the road to the midterms. Assuming we have them.
Not that I wish to hang the crepe. It’s just 88 degrees outside, and I am so fucking done with this. It might as well be nine below zero.
Meanwhile, in Ohio:
What sort of person looks at the guy on the right, this human mosquito, his whitened veneers gleaming in the light, and says, “That’s my guy.” The guy hasn’t had to figure out how the increase the budget of a small-city public-works department without increasing taxes, but he wants to run the state. I ask you.
Gift link to this excellent WashPost explainer on how the Texas floods happen. Even if you don’t read it, scroll through the graphics, which are outstanding, particularly the one showing the location of the Camp Mystic cabins vis-a-vis the riverbed. It’s…shocking. Maybe even criminal.
A good piece on another Stephen Miller manque, working at the state level. In Florida, of course.
Finally, Michelle Goldberg on MAGA and the Epstein story. Worth a read.
OK, then. A cooldown — a real one — is coming by week’s end, we’re told. We shall see. I leave you with a photo of Tuesday’s muggy, smoky sunrise. It’s pretty, though!
Brandon said on July 16, 2025 at 4:36 am
Vog will give that effect to sunrises and sunsets here. For example, https://www.flickr.com/photos/102859934@N02/54634923909/in/photostream/
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David C said on July 16, 2025 at 6:13 am
It’s hotter than hell and we’ve had plenty of rain too. Everything is so lush and must be pushing out tons of pollen because my allergies are going nuts. It feels like every year is a new worst allergy season ever.
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Jeff Gill said on July 16, 2025 at 7:21 am
Thank you for that sunrise.
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alex said on July 16, 2025 at 9:03 am
I hope they hold tribunals for people who burn plastics before they round up the people with outdoor cats. We have one, a tom, that hardly earns its keep given the exploding chipmunk population around here and the cat’s utter disinterest in them. Kitty’s a stray that showed up a few years ago shortly after our previous feral cat croaked and it stuck around because, like the last one, we feed it Purina Fancy Feast. Unfortunately this one sprays on my front porch and it’s getting on my last nerve.
I’ve got the NYT app on my phone and it seems to send push notifications for things after I’ve already read them.
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Jeff Borden said on July 16, 2025 at 9:56 am
Aside from four-plus years in Charlotte, N.C., I’ve always lived in the Great Lakes region, where I remember fondly wet, cool springs evolving into warm summers with the hottest heat in August. Now, I can’t remember the last time we had a nice spring. We go from cold to gates of hell within days. God thing our brilliant political leadership is working hard to mitigate global climate change, eh?
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Jenine said on July 16, 2025 at 10:58 am
Our sunset yesterday was red as well. Smoke can make for pretty colors in the sky.
I wish I could tell John Roberts that he gets to pick between naif (a horrible insult for a Supreme Court justice) or collaborator. If he doesn’t want to hear complaints about his performance, he should stop cooperating with the evil.
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Sherri said on July 16, 2025 at 11:19 am
No, Roberts is not a naïf. He’s not even a collaborator. He’s one of the creators of our current world. Long before Trump ever entered politics, Roberts paved the way by gutting the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County.
He’s every bit as responsible as Alito and Thomas, he just wants to be liked outside the world of conservative nutcases, too, so he tries to pretend he’s not really as crazy as they are.
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Jeff Borden said on July 16, 2025 at 11:39 am
John Roberts is the worst chief justice since Roger Taney. Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, etc where their scorn on their faces, but Roberts’ bland demeanor can’t hide he’s worse than all of them combined.
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nancy said on July 16, 2025 at 1:17 pm
Alex, one of Alan’s staffers when we were in FW lived in “the region,” and her neighbor burned fucking asphalt shingles. It took quite a while to get through a whole roof’s worth, just weeks of this simmering air pollution next door. She ended up dying of a chronic lung ailment, which was surely tied to her smoking, but my pulmonologist buddy tells me smoking is a co-antagonist in a lot of these cases. Which means there are lots of coal miners who didn’t get black lung, but those who did were smokers. And now that I think of it, I wonder if some of those shingles were asbestos, too.
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alex said on July 16, 2025 at 1:37 pm
We get occasional whiffs of creosote from people disposing of their old railroad ties used as landscaping timbers. We’re allowed to burn cardboard, wood and leaves but there are people who abuse the privilege, for sure, and you can tell not only by the smell of the smoke but the color. If it’s not white you know it’s not right.
I think Carney misspoke, or perhaps was being glib, because the White House is most definitely for sale.
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Sherri said on July 16, 2025 at 2:11 pm
I really don’t understand the rot in the souls of people like Stephen Miller. What makes him hate other people so fiercely? Apparently he’s been like this since he was in high school, at least. Is it just that he’s a sociopath, only instead of becoming a serial killer, he prefers to kill in bulk rather than one at a time?
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Dexter Friend said on July 16, 2025 at 2:39 pm
Of course, at 9:00 AM, Speaker Johnson walked back yesterday’s opinion that transparency into the Epstein saga is best. By now everybody has heard Trump just disowned every Repugg that calls for release of the Epstein case, files, dispositions, anything…Trump stated he no longer wants their support…MT Greene, Boebert, all the Senators and Representatives…he said he is done with them. Watch this happen: Trump will welcome them all back with hugs and pussy-grabs.
I had no idea that MLB has conconcted up a home run contest to decide All-Star games tied after 9 innings. Kyle Schwarber who played college baseball in Bloomington, was awesome, 3 swings, 3 ding-dong-johnsons.
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Jason T. said on July 16, 2025 at 2:48 pm
Ohio has aggressively been advertising in Pennsylvania this year — both for tourism and for relocating your business to Ohio — so I suspect they’ve finally woken up to the fact that young people are leaving in droves.
Between 2010 and 2020, Ohio’s population grew 2.3 percent, to 11.8 million.
Over the same period, New York City’s population grew 7.7 percent, to 8.8 million. (It has dropped a little since then.)
Yeah, a lot of people (especially any people who aren’t white, straight, and Christian) are gonna want to move from New York City to, say, Akron.
(No offense, Akron! Sorry. Go Zips!)
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Jeff Borden said on July 16, 2025 at 3:06 pm
An absurdly amateurish commercial has run in the Chicago market urging young people to make Ohio their home. A white guy and a black girl meet at a dance, they both declare how happy they are in their work in Ohio and then, boom, they’re in the backyard of an anodyne suburban house. It’s stupid. Not as stupid as the nightly airing of the Secretary of Homeland Hair Extensions extolling how big daddy pedophile is keeping us safe from those Messicans, but it comes close.
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Jason T. said on July 16, 2025 at 3:23 pm
Jeff at 14, I feel like I’ve seen that one, too.
If someplace is truly desirable, you don’t have to keep telling people that.
I’m trying to imagine the upwardly mobile inter-racial Chicago couple who’s sitting around, enjoying a late-night cocktail after a dance in a hip city neighborhood, when they suddenly blurt out, simultaneously, “You know what? We should move to Franklin County, where most of the restaurants close at 9.”
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Julie Robinson said on July 16, 2025 at 4:50 pm
Not too many of the younger folk I know want to live in anodyne suburbia, they want the excitement of the city.
We’re fighting our horrible governor and the execrable detention facility, and yesterday there was a victory. Orange County had signed a cooperation agreement with ICE, but yesterday the commissioners walked it back. This is big, especially since ICE was asking the local officers to transport their victims, I mean detainees, at the county’s expense. It’s about two hours away, so it would probably take one whole shift.
A large coalition of faith leaders and immigration rights workers came together and had 75 people signed up to speak at the meeting yesterday. If you guess that our daughter was one, you’d be right.
Both our state senator and representative, as well as our local congressman have been applying constant pressure in speaking up and visiting the facility. They are all under 40, multi-racial, and two are gay. They understand and identify with those in the facility. I’m not calling it Alligator Alcatrez anymore because I think it’s demeaning.
These are not just tomorrow’s leaders, they are today’s. They give me hope.
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Colleen said on July 16, 2025 at 6:03 pm
We had a neighbor in my childhood neighborhood who always seemed to have a stinky fire going. We referred to him as Barney Burner. I wondered how he could find enough stuff to burn to warrant a constant fire.
Alex, is there a TVNR program for feral cats there? I think Humane Fort Wayne has one. If you can trap the cat, he can be neutered and vaccinated, then released to ignore your chipmunks again. Neutering will help with the spraying, which is why I bring it up.
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alex said on July 16, 2025 at 6:14 pm
Thanks Colleen. That’s on the to-do list. But I know someone who crated a cat years ago for just that purpose and his car still smells like it.
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Deborah said on July 16, 2025 at 8:09 pm
Yesterday was my first trip to Abiquiu since we got back to NM on the 4th of July. It was smokey, there are 3 fires burning north east and west of our cabin, They are many multiple miles away but the smoke travels. The sunset was very nice last night.
The reason I haven’t been spending much time at the cabin so far is that I’m trying to get my husband to design screens for the sleeping loft area windows and he hasn’t done it yet which bugs me, and I mean that in more ways than one.
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